Its been getting a lot of press recently because it was suposed to come online a few months ago but it didn't work. And for the price tag we could feed the majority of the African Continent. Oh well. Personally I think String Theory, like trying to make a lunar base on the Moon, is a waste of time/money. We are better off focusing on things that really matter, like nuclear fusion

The LHC is going to end up costing well over its estimated 6 billion while nuclear fusion only recieves venture capital funds. Some nuclear fusion projects only cost around a million and say they could reach critical mass if they could just get 500,00 more in funding. And I don't think the two are really related. The LHC is more in the realm of all the String Theorists who scrible arcane symbols on paper and comuters all day to try and reach a theory of everything that none of them can agree on. Really I think they need to stop playing around and start doing something useful when the USA is intellectually falling father behind China and India every day.

You sound like Gregg Easterbrook, TMQ much? But as mentioned, the benefits of research are always unpredictable. History is replete with examples of this. The claim that we should spend the money on other things is nonsensical. We as a world are not limited to researching 1 thing at a time, again this isn't Civilization. Many extremely bright people are working on fusion right now, with ample funding I assure you.

On a side note, "really really fast"? A touch below the speed of light is not just fast, it's the (currently theorized) technical upper limit of speed in the universe.

Kaz wrote:You can't predict if something you research will be useful in advance. This isn't Civilization

I wasn't being completely sarcastic with my first post, I just think the idea is kind of funny. Also I agree with Obama that we should scale back NASA for the same basic reasons. Instead of spending billions and billions on colonizing the Moon and Mars we should focus on the realities of Earth. Don't get me wrong spaceships are cool and everything but the Cold War is mostly over and we beat Russia to the Moon, lets move on.

And have you seen a dry erase board filled up with all the Algebraic letters and numbers by one of these people. It's not pretty. I don't know about you but I have no desire to understand the Universe through numbers and "strings". Whether Universe has nine dimensions or four makes little difference to me. To me String Theory is just a highly educated scientific religion.

So basically you don't understand any of this and that's your reason not to fund it. You even do the "it's a religion!!!" equivalence like morons do to evolution. Awesome. Science in general would receive no funding if we listened to people like you because we're way past the era of stuff with immediate and obvious practical applications.

Obama is wrong. NASA needs funding exactly because it has no immediate practical use. It will never ever receive any if your condition is to wait until it does.

String Theory is wrong. Any legitimate physicist (if you see them on TV they're not legitimate) could tell you this. After 20 years they have absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, to show for all the work they have done. At this point it is a "religion" as you put it, in that it's unfalsifiable.

After hearing all that I would still allow them to continue funded research. More knowledge and information is never a bad thing. I could be wrong you never know. Even if they're wrong, at least we will know they're wrong and can possibly apply they're research to a new theory or idea. These things tend to build on one another in that way.

When science stops, society stops advancing. You say the Cold War is over. But look at what it did for our lives. We landed people on the moon as you say. We invented all sorts of cool devices and computer technologies, not to mention the internet itself. We advanced research in almost every field of electronics and bio-research. In the absence of being pushed, we have to push ourselves.

The LHC isnt only one of the most important ventures in all of science it also may very well have alot of broad sweeping implications.For example the Higgs Bozon.If they are right and the LHC helps them learn the origin of mass(the Higgs Bozon or GOD particle) then we would be able to use gravity like we do electricity or any of the other forces.Then getting food to the starving Africans would cost alot less. Also if everyone thought as you do then in the 1700's we would have stop advancing seeing how they anounced " everything worth discovering has been discovered".How small minded can some people be?

Kaz wrote:You can't predict if something you research will be useful in advance. This isn't Civilization

I wasn't being completely sarcastic with my first post, I just think the idea is kind of funny. Also I agree with Obama that we should scale back NASA for the same basic reasons. Instead of spending billions and billions on colonizing the Moon and Mars we should focus on the realities of Earth. Don't get me wrong spaceships are cool and everything but the Cold War is mostly over and we beat Russia to the Moon, lets move on.

And have you seen a dry erase board filled up with all the Algebraic letters and numbers by one of these people. It's not pretty. I don't know about you but I have no desire to understand the Universe through numbers and "strings". Whether Universe has nine dimensions or four makes little difference to me. To me String Theory is just a highly educated scientific religion.

footnote: I have never played Civilization.

I don't even know what argument to take up, here. I feel the need to quote Zbigniew Brzezinski and state that your ignorance on these matters is stunning.

If it took politics to get us to the moon, that's all well and good. But just because we did it doesn't mean we should put it on a shelf for posterity. It took hitting rock bottom to get me motivated and back into school full time. And now I am, yay! But that doesn't mean once I finish all the school I need to do to "win" I'm just going to put my PhD on a shelf and go back to grooming dogs. That's stupid and shows a distinct lack of appreciation for success in general. (I suspect the next argument will be that we didn't even go to the moon - it was all just smoke and mirrors to one-up Russia.) Just because you can doesn't mean you should. But just because you did doesn't mean you shouldn't.

Also, just because -you- don't understand something doesn't mean it's worthless. Just because -you- aren't compelled to discover more about the world around you, doesn't make research worthless. "Lol we decoded the human genome, genetic research is worthless now har har". Isn't this what you're saying? You think String Theory is a bunch of BS, or what did you call it? A religion? I think your notions about throwing that money at "global issues" is delusional and strikingly uneducated. Which is ironic, considering your statement about the US falling behind India and China intellectually. Maybe if we encouraged our students to pursue ideas (in any field) that were a mystery to them, that didn't make sense, that the uneducated would consider nothing more than "arcane symbols scribbled on paper" we'd be a little more on the ball. Instead we're encouraging our children to sit on their asses and critique everything from a culturally-superior pedestal, while other cultures make leaps and bounds in science. And then these same people have the gall to spit on discovery when they have absolutely no understanding of what's presented to them.

For a student who is part of a high school system that sees "no pertinent need" for the arts in its cirriculum, you seem totally immune to the fascinating nature of science. I thought that was all they were teaching you kids these days.

I can see both sides of the argument, and both are important. It's true, all the money spent on the LHC could have been spent on much more practical things, poverty, food, etc. On the other hand, Earth is pretty fucked. Let's be honest, even if we change what we do now, Earth will not be habitable forever, and science is our solution. Space colonies may seem sci-fi now, but I believe we'll (humans) be on them some day. There just needs to be a balance between the two.

I am resisting posting another gigantic rant in this thread, this one with sources and support, because I've spent the last six months buried in research on this very topic. Not the LHC in particular, but some reading on it as it pertained to American high energy physics. I've been working with a few historians/physicists and have learned a lot about the politics, the funding, the public relations, the pure science, the foreign relations, etc., and what these things are all about, and all I have to say is that this stuff is intensely important.

Also, the US was involved in the LHC - the project is designed, built, and run by CERN, but the US was brought in as well, in the wake of the SSC cancellation. See "Four years after SSC's demise, US reaches agreement on 'unprecedented' collaboration in CERN's LHC", Irwin Goodwin, PHYSICS TODAY, 51(1).

I know this because it is sitting open on my screen, waiting for me to paste all its text into a Word document.

Universe in the nutshell, pg 177-178 wrote: We don't know exactly what the fundamental Planck length is in M-theory, but it might be as small as a millimeter divided by a hundred thou-sand billion billion billion. We are not about to build particle accel-erators that can probe to distances that small. They would have to be larger than the solar system

You can fit only so much particle accelerator inside of Earth. Unfortunately physics isn't my major, and I'm unsure how much overall length turns into collider collision energy, but from what I know they are becoming bigger and bigger.